Grand Forks, N.D. has come back a long way since a disastrous flood in 1997. Could it teach New Orleans a thing or two?

When the order to evacuate Grand Forks, N.D. came down, Jon C. Larson and his 20 Sure Foot Corp. employees scrambled to their vehicles and scattered. Hours after the decreed exodus on Apr. 18, 1997 the cantankerous Red River crashed over levees and mauled the town. Two days later Larson and his general sales manager, Wayne Waege, returned to the chaos. "Anything downstairs that wasn't bolted down was floating," Jon says. He recalls turning to Waege to ask, "Is that the compressor going by right there?" It was.

Their inventory--from laces to insoles--was wiped out. Still, Larson and his brother Van B. set up a makeshift sales office 70 miles down I-29 in Fargo. Most of their telephone sales reps had bolted to points across the country. The Larsons eventually scraped up some of their people and got going again. They took out a $600,000 loan from the Small Business Administration to keep cutting paychecks.

The owners of their headquarters building didn't want to foot the bill to repair all the damage and sold the 24,000-square-foot building to the Larsons for dirt--$250,000. Since the disaster the company has moved much of its new product manufacturing to Taiwan and China. To curb risk, the Larsons also diversified: Among other things, they now make fleece clothing and distribute shoe polish. Company head count is up to 46, and revenues have tripled since 1997 to $8 million. Despite the comeback, Jon says, "I could never do it again."

New Orleans, bumbling through its early recovery, dominates the headlines. But the upper Midwest remembers the soggy spring of 1997 all too well. Even before the three years' worth of snow (100 inches) that fell during the winter started melting, townsfolk stacked sandbags in anticipation of a raging Red River, which runs north to Manitoba's Lake Winnipeg. It did little good. The flood destroyed or damaged 11,000 homes and businesses and deposited 13,000 livestock carcasses throughout the valley. The water touched off a natural gas fire that engulfed 11 historic downtown buildings. Airborne water tankers were called in because fire trucks couldn't ford the 6-foot-deep water. "You read in the Bible, the end of the world?" then mayor Patricia Owens recalls. "That's how it felt."

The months following sorely tested everyone. Despite warnings from the federal government that residents should buy flood insurance, only 20% had any when the water came. Debt from digging out weighed on the community; 28% of businesses still carried flood debt in 2003. Domestic violence in Grand Forks spiked 24% the year following the flood. "That was our darkest time," says the current mayor, Michael Brown.

Things feel better now in Grand Forks, which has ferociously clawed back from $2 billion in wreckage to thrive. The town lost 3,000 of its 47,000 people after 1997, but it recovered in two years and has added an additional 6,000 folks since. Why? Jobs. Unemployment averaged 3.5% last year, compared with the national rate of 5.1%. The city is number 28 among our Best Smaller Metros with populations of fewer than 230,000 (for the full list, go to forbes.com/bestplaces).

Jobs come to Grand Forks because of its people, 89% of whom have high school diplomas (the national average is 80%) and 64% of whom have some education beyond high school. Amazon.com
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), which prefers that its customer service employees hold college degrees, planted a 300-person call center here in 1999.

LM Glasfiber, a $400 million (sales) manufacturer in Lunderskov, Denmark and the world's largest maker of wind turbine blades, saw an upside. It opened a Grand Forks factory in 1999, with 25 employees in 83,000 square feet. LM now has 300 employees and 150,000 square feet with plans for more expansion. "We get people knocking on the door looking for jobs," says General Manager Blake A. Seas.

Plant workers walk up and down inside colossal molds, packing down sheets of fiberglass, applying epoxy and perfecting the massive balsa wood cores. Jobs average $12.50 an hour, plus benefits. This is finesse work on a huge scale, not grunt labor. Trucks leaving the plant require back wheels that steer in order to get the 123-foot blades onto highway entrance ramps. A blade weighs 12,000 pounds and must fall within a few pounds of the blade it's paired with. A pair of the blades costs about $300,000--15% to 20% of the total cost of a 1.5 megawatt turbine, which can supply power for 450 homes.

North Dakota puts LM more or less equidistant from customers in Texas, California, the Carolinas and the farther provinces of Canada. There's a nearby market, too, in the wind-swept farms of the Dakotas.

Early Norwegian settlers maintained Grand Forks, which was a pit stop on the river from St. Paul to Winnipeg. The town is still 36% Norwegian. They can handle the short summers.

Just after the flood municipal and federal officials hatched plans for a $400 million levee system that would sit farther back from the river than the old, defeated levees. That meant whole swaths of the town simply vanished. The Lincoln Drive neighborhood, once a favorite of first-time home buyers, was leveled. It's now a park accessed through a handsome gate in the massive 12-foot levee walls, which surround the town like a medieval fortress. The levees, which are 85% complete, were tested this April when the Red hit its sixth-highest mark on record. No sandbags needed. "It was a nonevent," Mayor Brown says.

Resolute action kept Cirrus Design in Grand Forks. The $280 million (sales) small-aircraft maker was completing construction on its plant in 1997 when the town got whacked. "We wondered if enough people would stay so that we could staff our plant with the kind of people we wanted," says Alan Klapmeier, cofounder and chief. No problems there, and today the SR22 is the bestselling single-engine four-seater in the world: Last year customers bought 450 of the $400,000 planes. The plant is finishing off a cavernous expansion to triple its size to 170,000 square feet.

A 20-foot-long "Now Hiring" banner hangs over the entrance. Headquartered in Duluth, Minn., Cirrus will add 150 people to its 350-person Grand Forks crew in the next five years. "It's been a rocket ride," says John C. Hitchcock, the plant's development director. Cirrus has grown at a steady 20% clip since coming to North Dakota. The Grand Forks factory annually makes 100,000 carbon and fiberglass composite parts. Its plane bodies are 100% composite, mostly fiberglass, some graphite. Workers mold, cut and trim pieces to the finest of allowances.

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